Digital Bazes

The aim of this seminar is to conceive of, and create, public spaces in which digital exchange takes place. Or in other words, to make places for people to swop music, films, photos, games, books or any other digital data. Of course this is what happens all over the Internet every day. The difference here is that we will try to create actual physical spaces where people can congregate and swop, share and exchange thoughts, ideas and files.

The seminar will give a basic introduction into some technologies and practices of offline sharing (Dead drops, Pirate Box, Opencoil, Xender / Cuba's El Paquete, Solomon Islands Micro SD Card economy, Delhi film exchanges). However our focus is to try and understand what actually happens, on an embodied level, when information is shared with these tools. Which kind of relationships are necessary for this peer-to-peer exchange to occur? What feelings and emotions and relationships are necessary for, and produced by, this interpersonal exchange? And what kind of social and physical spaces enable this exchange to take place?

The seminar includes a weekend workshop (16th – 17th November 2024) at Künstlerdorf Schöppingen as part of the Making Worlds workshop series.